I mean, he could’ve been contacted and hired by a bigger company for a collaboration for new software based on Vital. That’s one way you can end up signing an non-disclosure agreement.
I think it’s a possibility, but it still doesn’t explain the absolute zero communication. It doesn’t make sense to me.
I have purchased mine and i hope he pops up soon and not with another version
that you need to purchase … and if so then i hope for all that do own the purchased version get a discount on it.
anyway being away is for a programmer like for an artist ,
creativity and inspiration are beyond time itself so … time is no time = he be back when he 'll be.
Wishing him all he needs to proceed and be happy in Live .
Ital.
If he actually said; “Hey guys, I’s dipping on Vital and gonna get filthy rich with Dave Gamble on Serum 2!” I might have needed to sit down…
I bought into this product at the highest tier. I really wanted to support it.
I also bought Synthmaster One. I think it is important to support talented people. Unfortunately, I think these were my worst purchases this year. Vital is good as a free synth. Vital makes sense as a free synth. I should have left it there.
And to be fair you CAN do worse. Synthmaster One is commercial software and is so broken it comes with half the effects disabled.
But I think I’m finished paying for synths from small teams of artists. I’ve reached the conclusion that most if not all software needs an entire team focused on marketing, support, and testing.
Maybe Matt is reaching that same conclusion. He’s probably just in way over his head. Either that or he took early retirement. Who knows.
Right now there is another synth built by one person. Looks amazing. It’s called Altitude and I’m not buying. Just because I cannot do this a third time.
For $150 you can buy U-He Hive 2 and have a rock solid synth with 2000 usable presets. It has native Linux support and a team of dedicated developers and testers. That is what you are buying when you spend the $150. You aren’t just buying the synthesizer. You are buying the people that support you. And honestly, it’s a steal for that.
I reached out to the mods in the discord server… but none of them have heard from Matt as well.
oh well…
Where I get the sentiment, the thing is, Hive 2 can’t do what Vital does.
That’s the problem. Memes about “the free Serum” aside, the fact is nothing out there really does what Vital does. Most of the other “wavetable powerhouse” synths like Phase Plant, Serum, Hive, etc can’t do all the wacky spectral stuff Vital is capable of doing. And where there are some synths (like Razor, Harmor, Thorn, etc) that CAN, those synths don’t give you the same power over base waveforms with stuff like wavetables, phase distortion, audio rate modulation, etc.
There are a couple of real monsters that come close (MSoundFactory and Pigments) but they (like Phase Plant, which I’m sure will one day do the additive/spectral thing now that they’ve done the granular thing) are based on this “engine paradigm”, where the synth is actually 4 or 5 different synths that just share unrelated parts. You want to do a Razor bass? Use the additive engine. You want to do a hard sync lead? Use the analogue engine.
But if you want to hard sync your Razor bass, you have to use Vital. It lives in this weird interconnected space where different synthesis methods are tied up in a knot, so you can phase distort your FM-modulated spectral smeared wavetable with an audio-rate oscillation on parallel self-resonating filters, and that’s just not something any other synth allows you to do. It’s not just that it can do spectral, wavetable, subtractive, FM, physical modeling, wavefolding, and phase distortion well, it’s that it’s doing them all at the same time. You can borrow techniques from one or the other and mix them together and get something really interesting.
Nobody is doing that. I WISH someone else was doing that. I wish everyone else was doing that. The closest thing out there is Toybox, because the Atomic pack can do some pretty cool stuff in this area, but it’s a series of modular Reaktor Blocks, not a proper plugin, and that makes using it an unwieldy nightmare.
Now, would I spend the money to get a synth by a dedicated full-time staff from a group like Arturia if they were doing that? You bet. Because I get the argument that it’s a more “reliable investment”. But companies like that just aren’t making products like Vital.
As it stands, I haven’t spent my $80 on Vital. Not yet. It’s not “value” for me, I don’t give a crap about skins or presets. I’m a sound designer and it’s a sound design tool, and a fresh and exciting one. My reason for spending $80 will be because that’s how you support its creator. I want to support Matt so he can then turn around and add more cool shit to Vital. But there’s no point in doing that if Matt’s abandoned it and moved on to another project. If he has, I wish him godspeed, I’m 2 years late to the Vital party and I’m sure he’s got plenty of other ideas cooking around upstairs. But for me, I don’t view the purchase of the synth as some sort of investment in a tool that demands support, I view it as a way of saying “yeah man, keep on doing what you’re doing with Vital”.
If that message is sure to fall on deaf ears, I’ll keep the cash, you know?
Also
To be fair, Steve Duda personally answered every single Serum support email for years. I’m pretty sure that even after having been bought out by IL, Vojtech is the only person doing anything at all at Melda Productions. Minimal Audio is, I think, 3 guys. Kilohearts is, I think, 4. Many of the most prominent and important synths of the last decade have been made by one-man-army “companies” or very small teams. I don’t think Vital has gotten to be so overwhelmingly popular that Matt literally CAN’T handle it.
As for where he is? I don’t know. Maybe something bad happened and he’s unable to respond. Maybe he just got bored and decided to work on another project. Maybe he took a contract job doing something else and he’s not permitted to work on personal projects until it’s over. Maybe he decided that he does his best coding when he doesn’t have the internet to distract him and swore off the forum so he could get more work done.
For all I know he gets up every day, makes a cup of coffee, and spends 10 hours implementing new DSP algorithms in his office and has no idea anyone using Vital is concerned about his absence from the social media sphere around the synth.
Oh, I know that Hive 2 won’t do all the things that Vital does. But it does all the things I need and a lot more. At the end of the day I just need to make music.
I respect where you are coming from. And the primary reason that I expect support as a part of the product, is because it is stated as a part of the purchase. Full stop.
I applaud your choice of holding onto your money. It’s a good call.
Hi, yes I’m fine.
I did have to step away from the forum and discord for a while because of a unexpected family health issue which took my full attention (I won’t go into details but everything turned out OK thankfully).
And yes, I’m still working and Vital (and some stuff that might go into a new plugin). I think when I have some time I’ll hire somebody to give more support and respond to users so it’s not just silent from me if I have to step away for something like this or if I just want to focus on development.
(going to lock the thread because it’s gotten a bit off topic)